Now that we have conclusively decided that we are staying in AZ through the holidays, we are beginning to settle in. We are also having to deal with the fact that we left Denver assuming we would return in mid-December. So we both had doctors’ appointments scheduled right before Christmas. I didn’t take many cool-weather clothes because I planned on bringing them on Christmas Day. Most troubling, I didn’t bring all of our medications, and insurance companies get perturbed if you start asking for more meds when they KNOW you haven’t used all of the ones they sent you last.

We both spent time on the telephone yesterday cancelling appointments, and trying to explain that we couldn’t reschedule because we had no idea when we would be returning. Bill was supposed to see his neurologist, but he was told they couldn’t do Zoom visits when the patient is not in the same state. Something to do with malpractice. Hmmmm. My doctor visit was dental in nature, and while we have learned to do a lot via the computer, teeth examination and cleaning is not one of those things.

We also made a firm decision that since we were staying here, we were going to buy another bed. Long-time readers may or may not recall that I have written before about our bed purchases. I wrote this blog post in 2013 when we last bought a bed here in AZ. You will notice that I was rather cocky and overly pleased with the fact that we purchased the bed in 16 minutes from start to finish. (And we weren’t even facing COVID at that time). Frankly, it didn’t take much longer than that for us to realize that perhaps we should have spent a tad more time picking out our mattress. That mattress has ended up being a bust, plain and simple. To be fair, however, what it mostly has going against it is that it is queen-size. It can’t help it. We set out to purchase queen-size; we purchased queen-size; we now regret queen-size.

In a more recent blog post, I wrote about our purchase of a king-sized bed in Denver. I listed all of the reasons why we made the jump from queen to king. I also noted that we spent considerably more time making our purchase decision. I LOVE THAT BED. When we’re in Denver, sometime around 4:30 every afternoon, I start wishing I could go to bed. It’s that comfortable. It only took a few nights in our queen-sized bed here in AZ before we determined a critical need for a king-sized bed. But now we were facing COVID, and shopping for mattresses wasn’t really something I wanted to do.

My sister Bec mentioned to me that her son Erik had recently purchased a new bed from a company called Tuft and Needle. He and his wife were thrilled about the bed. Comfortable. Purchased online and delivered straight to your door. Best bed they’ve ever had.

Boom. Ordered. I also ordered a box spring, a bed frame, a mattress cover, a bed quilt, new sheets, and a partridge in a pear tree. Merry Christmas to me. We’ve received everything except the bed. We paid extra for a third-party business to come and set it up for us and remove our old mattress. We didn’t think we would be able to persuade a FedEx delivery person to handle such a task. And I sure as heck wasn’t going to try and lift a king-sized mattress and box spring.

Now we patiently await the ringing of the doorbell indicating our mattress has arrived. It occurred to me, however, that I probably spent less than 16 minutes buying a mattress that not only have I not tried out, but haven’t even set eyes on.

Give me two years before I write my next bed-purchase post.

Yesterday my sister Jen ran into the grocery store to pick up some ice cream to treat her granddaughter Lilly during their “girls’ night” sleepover. Her pooch Winston was with us, and he and I stayed in the car. He was upset when she left him behind as she ran into the door. He cried for a bit, and then decided to be patient and wait for her. When I turned around, he looked so adorable as he waited that it made me laugh…..

An adorable pooch will always make us smile! Have a great weekend.

After Bec’s husband died, she made the decision to sell their house in northern Virginia and move lock, stock, and barrel to Arizona, where they had purchased a home a year or so earlier. Her two kids helped as much as they could, but they both had those inconvenient things called JOBS. So it was mostly left up to her. She was amazing. In one summer, she packed up a house in which she had lived for 30-some years. She filled dumpsters, she made trips to Goodwill, she packed boxes and boxes of cherished items.

Only a couple of things threw her. There were a couple of legal guns that he had owned. She didn’t want to touch them. Some may ask why. Not this blogger, because I wouldn’t have touched either gun in a million years. What if the gun is loaded? What if my finger slipped? What if I accidentally pointed it at my face and it went off? She called a friend of her son’s, who came over and took care of getting rid of the guns.

The second thing that brought her to a halt was the photos. Her husband was a voracious photographer, and a good one at that. He was patient when he took a picture — patient to the point that by time he finally pressed the button, we were all yelling at him through fake smiles: For the love of God, Terry, take the damn picture.

There were hundreds and hundreds of photos. The two of them were well-travelled, and the photos confirmed that. There were photos of their children through the years. There were photos of trips to Colorado to visit the family. There were photos of European and Japanese shops, because he liked to photographically document where he bought special keepsakes. You can imagine how they added up.

After giving it great thought, she narrowed down the photos using these two rules: the photo had to have a person in it, and she had to know who that person was. After all, he wasn’t around to help identify his Great-Aunt Lucille. That meant that photos of the Eiffel Tower or Pikes Peak were tossed. Her philosophy was if I want to see a photo of the duomo in Florence, I can google it.

Don’t worry. I’m not going to show you any more old family photos since I have inundated my blog with photos this week so far. But what occurred to me as I looked at the old photos is that I’m not sure we have made things easier by storing our photos on our cell phones or in the Cloud. That just makes it really, really difficult to show people our photos. I can recall a million times when someone has passed their germy cell phone around so that we can look at their granddaughter dancing in The Nutcracker or eating their first birthday cake.

Bill and I use Google Photos to store our pictures. It helps keep my cell phone from using all of its storage capacity on photos. It doesn’t, however, make it any easier to find a photo I want to show someone. Google Photos is good as long as you have a reasonable sense of when the photo was taken. Mostly, I can’t remember photos that I took yesterday.

Standing around a friend’s computer screen or staring at a cell phone isn’t quite as much fun as passing around photos of your grandkids opening their Christmas gifts. But it’s a technological world, and being able to take a photo of a kitchen table you like in the store makes up for the coldness of the computer screen.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing that makes it fun to look at travel photos from the person in the next cubicle, whether it’s on a computer screen or a piece of photo paper.

I didn’t take a shower until I was a freshman in college.

Don’t worry. It’s not that I didn’t wash myself regularly. It’s just that for the first 18 years of my life, I lived in a house that had no shower. Yep. One bathroom for the six of us — Mom, Dad, three girls and a boy — that had a bathtub only.

At some point — maybe when the house was built — a shower was put into our basement. It was a shower head and a drain built into the cement floor. No walls. Just a place that — probably in desperation — Dad went to take a shower. No privacy, but that didn’t matter because, being a baker, his showers were taken at 4 o’clock in the morning. But dang, it must have been chilly in the winter. Not a single one of the rest of us would have used that shower. It was Nebraska, and there were undoubtedly bugs that lived in our basement. No thanks.

Bill and Jen and I went to live Mass yesterday with Bec at her church — St. Steven’s. After church we went back to her house and had what she called a “hillbilly breakfast” but what I called delicious. A homemade coffee cake using our Aunt Ann’s recipe, and some pork sausages. Our hillbilly breakfast was accompanied by mimosa’s made from prosecco and cranberry juice, with real cranberries as garnishes. I can’t imagine any such thing made by a really true hillbilly. Anyhoo, as we ate, we got to talking about the house in which we all spent our formative years.

Dad and Mom built the house. Well, I don’t mean they actually showed up every day with hammers and nails and such. But Dad bought the lot and found a home design he liked and had the house built. At the time, the neighborhood was out on the edge of town, surrounded by fields. Dad says many people warned him that he would be sorry some day that he built where he did. (He wasn’t.) Bec says she used to play cowgirl in the fields that surrounded our home.

In hindsight, we all know that the house was S-M-A-L-L, particularly by today’s standards of one bedroom per child. There were three bedrooms in our little brick home, and as indicated above, one small bathroom with a bathtub. When we washed our hair, we connected a hose with a sprayer on the end onto the faucet to get out the shampoo. That’s why I didn’t shower until nearly adulthood. (By the way, I was supposed to be showering after every P.E. class in high school, but that never happened. What? Getting naked in front of strangers? Not for this shy gal.

I also never had a room of my own until I was 21 years old and finally got an apartment when I moved to Leadville, Colorado, where my parents lived. I shared with Bec. I shared with Jen. I’m pretty sure at one point, our baby brother Dave’s crib was in with Jen and me.

Baby Boomers won’t be surprised to know that we thought we lived like royalty. Our house was made from bricks (so the big bad wolf couldn’t blow it down). There was beautiful parquet wood tiles in our dining room (which we never used except for holidays and homework).

Mom was very proud of that wooden dining room floor. Bec told us a true story that I had never before heard that shows how proud Mom was: When we were babies, Mom would spray the floor with polish, and push whichever one of her children was still in cloth diapers around on the floor to buff it…..

I can’t tell you how much I love that story.